In honor of World Theater Day, celebrated internationally each March twenty seventh since 1962, listed here are 10 stunning theaters from around the globe, and 10 nice books about New York theater.

However first: an excerpt from the 2024 World Theater Day message, translated from the Norwegian, from Jon Olav Fosse, the Norwegian playwright, creator and translator who was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature:

“All good artwork, deep down, revolves across the identical factor: taking the totally distinctive, the totally particular, and making it common. Uniting the actual with the common by the use of expressing it artistically: not eliminating its specificity however emphasizing this specificity, letting what’s international and unfamiliar shine clearly by means of.

“Battle and artwork are opposites, simply as struggle and peace are opposites—it’s so simple as that. Artwork is peace.”

Click on on every {photograph} to see it enlarged

Theater isn’t simply the buildings by which it takes place. The phrase “theater” comes from a Greek verb that means ‘to behold’.

Behold these books about New York theater (listed chronologically by publication date, and linked to their web page on Amazon)

Act One: An Autobiography by Moss Hart (re-creation St. Martin’s, 464 pages)
Moss Hart’s eloquent, entertaining (and, many say, a lot fictionalized) chronicle of his impoverished childhood and his lengthy, decided battle to succeed in the opening night time of his first Broadway hit, initially printed in 1959.

Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops by Ken Mandelbaum (St. Martin’s Press, 1992, 384 pages.)
An entertaining and informative capsule descriptions of lots of of Broadway failures from 1950 to 1990.

Hat Field: The Collected Lyrics of Stephen Sondheim (Knopf, 2011, two volumes)
The grasp lyricist and composer’s annotated lyrics, together with transient historical past of how every of his exhibits got here to be, and lots of helpful, knowledgeable, opinionated digressions concerning the theater.

Music of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway Historical past by Glen Burger. (Simon and Schuster, 2013, 384 pages.) An instructive historical past of the Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Flip Off the Darkish” which broke innumerable information each good and unhealthy (the very best attendance in a single week, the longest preview interval, the largest cash loser, and so forth.), by a author who with Julie Taymor and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa is credited because the creator of the musical. “Earlier than one thing might be good, it first must be competent” is on the high of his checklist of classes discovered.

Tennessee Williams Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh by John Lahr (W.W. Norton & Firm, 2014, 764 pages.) Some 40 books have been written about playwright Tennessee Williams since his demise in 1983. I haven’t learn sufficient of them to supply an authoritative judgement, but it surely’s arduous to think about one better-written or extra informative than this one, written by the previous chief theater critic of the New Yorker.

Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway (Simon and Schuster, 2015, 464 pages)  is the primary ebook by
Michael Riedel, theater columnist for the New York Submit from 1998 to 2018 whom theater individuals beloved to hate. However Riedel leaves his withering remarks to himself on this historical past of Broadway within the Nineteen Seventies and Eighties. Specializing in the Shubert group, he recounts how the Broadway trade, on the snapping point, was reborn, each serving to (and helped by) the transformation of Occasions Sq. and town as an entire. However to inform the story, the ebook ranges almost the breadth of the twentieth century.

The Secret Lifetime of the American Musical: How Broadway Exhibits Are Constructed by Jack Viertel. (Farrar, Straus and Girous, 2016, 312 pages.) The splendidly readable ebook focuses on the construction of profitable musicals, going chronologically step-by-step from the overture to the finale. However beneath the rulebook, he’s arguing persuasively for the significance of the American musical: “If Shakespeare is England’s nationwide theatre, aren’t Broadway musicals ours?”

Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Performs Inform Us About Our Previous and Future James Shapiro (Penguin, 2020, 286 pages) The Shakespearean scholar who’s the creator of The Yr of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 and 1599:A Yr within the Lifetime of William Shakespeare appears at eight controversial occasions involving Shakespeare, which he calls “defining moments in American historical past.” Every chapter focuses on a selected 12 months, a selected play by Shakespeare, and particular problems with the day, which largely stay American points at present — long-standing tensions involving race, class, gender, immigration and different fault-lines in American tradition.

“Placing It Collectively: How Stephen Sondheim and I Created ‘Sunday within the Park with George’” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, 416 pages) is an eccentric, beneficial and entertaining ebook, which creator James Lapine describes early on as “a blended salad: one half memoir, one half oral historical past, one half how a musical will get written and produced.’” It additionally contains the complete script of Lapine and Sondheim’s 1984 Broadway musical, 

Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022, 480 pages) written with New York Occasions chief theater critic Jesse Inexperienced, based mostly on a number of years’ value of twice-weekly interviews, and now printed eight years after demise on the age of 83 of this composer, screenwriter, and creator who was Broadway royalty from start, because the daughter of Richard Rodgers.